DTN 093: The Growing Demand for Military Satellites

DARPA demos autonomous ship refueling, startups are geoengineering the ocean, the war on wildfires is going high tech, the case for solar geoengineering, and more.

Author

HAUS: The Deep Tech Agency
December 27, 2024

Space industrial base racing to meet growing demand for military satellites

“Over the next decade, the Defense Department intends to proliferate hundreds of new military satellites on orbit that will provide improved space-based capabilities for warfighters. While the effort has been lauded as an ambitious and innovative plan to revolutionize space acquisition and development for the modern era, it has also exposed critical vulnerabilities in the United States’ ability to manufacture and deliver systems at scale — an issue that both the Pentagon and industrial base are working to learn from moving forward.

“We do not have the industrial capacity built today to get after this,” Vice Chief of Space Operations Gen. Michael Guetlein said Dec. 7 during a panel at the Reagan National Defense Forum. “We’re going to have to start getting comfortable with the lack of efficiency in the industrial base to start getting excess capacity so that we have something to go to in times of crisis and conflict.”

Researchers have developed a set of VR goggles for lab mice for use in brain studies.

“Mice are frequently used in studies of brain activity and these VR goggles will allow scientists to provide immersive experiences for the mice, while capturing fluorescent images of the rodents' brain activity. The goggles—which dwarf the tiny mice in size—were built using low-cost, off-the-shelf components like smartwatch displays and tiny lenses, researchers said.” (via Nature Methods / Cornell University)